Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
After September 11 I analysed bin Laden’s words, his quotations, his explanations, and his mission statement which is: ‘We are at war with the West. They want to destroy Islam and we need to fight back.’ I wanted to know if all these things that bin Laden said were really in the Koran and in the Hadith. And, to my shock, they were. A lot of people say they are taken out of context, but they are completely not taken out of context. They are in context. They only thing that is out of context is the fact that this very old book which was put together by – well, we don’t know who the authors are, but it’s definitely more than one author – is considered to be valid in the 21st century.
There are four schools of thought in the Sunni (I was brought up a Sunni) and all four schools of thought agree it means: first of all, warn her, like a child. If she carries on this way, then the next step is not to share her bed, as a way of showing how disgruntled you are with her behaviour. Finally, there are the beatings, and the four schools of thought then go on to describe in detail how the beatings should take place. One shouldn’t leave wounds, the beating should be done with a small to a medium-sized stick, it’s to cause pain but not concussion, and so on. The same liberty is not given to women. And Muslim women I talk to say, ‘But we are equal in the Koran!’ But in my view, by no math is that any form of equality.
And then there is chapter 2, verse 223: ‘Your wives are as a tilth to you, Come unto your tilth from whenever or wherever you want.’ There’s a Hadith that goes on to explain what it means, which is that your wife is like an acre to you, and you can take her, you can have sex with her, at any time of day or night, when you please and how you please. And her consent is irrelevant. But her consent or lack of it, if you tie it to the previous verses, what it means is, that she’ll say no, and you’ll warn her and you just end up beating her. So beating and raping, marital rape in this case, are justified and sanctified.
But can’t you, as a Muslim, practise just some of the Koran and Hadith, and not all of it? Most Christians don’t take the Bible literally either.
It’s very good you brought this up, because people do that all the time. There’s a difference between Islam made up of the Koran and Hadith and all the other stuff. I make the distinction very clearly in the book. Muslims are very diverse, and I mean diverse in the sense of how much of the Koran and the Hadith they actually practise. For example, there are people who say the Koran is a good book, and it’s a holy book, and it’s the word of God. But they don’t practise everything it says. You’ll see Muslims drinking alcohol and having pre-marital sex and leading free lives.
But you didn’t want that to do that – you didn’t want to be a soft-line Muslim. You felt you had to reject it completely and became an atheist.
It’s not me who felt that. For the first ten years, from 1992 to 2001, before I got into this whole thinking about Islam, I was leading the life of a liberal, but I identified myself as a Muslim. The need for consistency came only after this whole debate that came about after September 11. And I would have continued to identify myself as a Muslim. At first I didn’t say I was an atheist, I started just by saying, ‘I am secularised.’ But more and more people that we call fundamentalists are trying to practise as much as possible of the Koran and the Hadith, and I was attacked and threatened for saying that I was secularised..
This is the difference between Christians and Muslims. If as a Christian today you decide not to practise your faith, you won’t have lots of people coming and telling you how wrong you are and how awful it is not to believe every word of the Bible and how you should go to church. It’s the opposite in Islam – there’s ever more people telling you that you are not a good Muslim.
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Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1969. She sought political asylum in the Netherlands in 1992 in order to escape an arranged marriage. She became a member of the Dutch parliament and made a film with Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh that led to his assassination by a Muslim extremist in 2004. She is currently a fellow at the right –wing think tank American Enterprise Institute and head of the AHA Foundation (www.theahafoundation.org), a charity that helps protect and defend the rights of women in the West against militant Islam.
